Development of Firefox for Windows 8 Metro UI confirmed.

Things have been changing rapidly for Firefox, which was once the browser of choice, owing to its security and performance. Mozilla has now expanded the browser to other platforms as well, and the browser is now available for Android smartphones and tablets. There isn’t an iOS version, but a Windows 8 version is supposedly in the works. Brian Brondy, a key developer on the Firefox browser wrote a new post on his personal blog about Firefox for Windows 8. He confirms that Mozilla is in fact working on a Windows 8 version. He talks about the project being pretty massive due to the number of elements.

The Windows 8 operating system has a few variations - classic desktop applications, the new Metro UI applications and then Metro-style desktop browsers. He speaks of a few limitations as well - for example, Firefox cannot be the default application in the Metro user interface - this is something Microsoft has designed with Windows 8. There are some other limitations as well. For example Metro UI requires a DirectX9 capable card to run and this would mean skipping out older systems, altogether.

The process it seems will begin by taking the Fennec browser designed for mobile devices and get it runing on the Windows 8 Metro user interface. Brian, along with other programmers have been busy working, last week on the logs, exporting the registry and utilities. All this was done, of course to get the a basic Metro app running. He talks about the lack of information in the form of Google search results, when it comes to find information on what they’re trying to do. The few next things to do would be getting a C++/XAML program going and minor things, such as theme rendering natively.

Firefox has been in the news recently for slowly losing followers, since Google Chrome has picked up pace. Both browsers offer similar sets of features, but Chrome is considered by many to be faster. Mozilla has taken this feedback seriously and are fighting back by optimizing the browser. Firefox like many of the other Mozilla projects have switched to a rapid release cycle, which adds smaller features, but is more often than usual.